by Tim Weiner
On Saturday night, April 8, Richard Bissell answered the insistent ring of his home phone. Jake Esterline was calling from Quarters Eye, the CIA’s Washington war room, saying he and Colonel Hawkins, his paramilitary planner, needed to see Bissell alone as soon as possible. Sunday morning, Bissell opened his front door to find Esterline and Hawkins in a state of barely controlled rage. They marched into his living room, sat down, and told him that the invasion of Cuba had to be called off.
It was too late to stop now, Bissell told them; the coup against Castro was set to begin in a week. Esterline and Hawkins threatened to resign. Bissell questioned their loyalty and patriotism. They wavered.
“If you don’t want a disaster, we absolutely must take out all of Castro’s air force,” Esterline told Bissell, not for the first time. All three knew that Castro’s thirty-six combat aircraft were capable of killing hundreds of the CIA’s Cubans as they went ashore. Trust me, said Bissell. He promised to persuade President Kennedy to wipe out Castro’s air force. “He talked us into continuing,” Esterline recalled bitterly. “He said, ‘I promise you that there will be no reductions of air raids.’”
But at the crucial hour, Bissell cut the American force sent to destroy Castro’s aircraft in half, from sixteen to eight bombers. He did it to please the president, who wanted a quiet coup. Bissell deceived him into believing the CIA would deliver one.
On Saturday, April 15, eight American B-26 bombers struck three Cuban airfields as the CIA’s brigade of 1,511 men headed for the Bay of Pigs. Five Cuban aircraft were destroyed and perhaps a dozen more damaged. Half of Castro’s air force remained. The CIA’s cover story was that the attacker was a sole Cuban air force defector who had landed in Florida. That day, Bissell sent Tracy Barnes to New York to peddle the tale to the American ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson.
Bissell and Barnes played Stevenson for a fool, as if he were their agent. Like Secretary of State Colin Powell on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, Stevenson sold the CIA’s story to the world. Unlike Powell, he discovered the next day that he had been had.
The knowledge that Stevenson was caught lying in public riveted Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who already had good reason to be enraged with the CIA. Only hours before, on the heels of another blown operation, Rusk had to send a formal letter of apology to Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore. The secret police in Singapore had burst into a CIA safe house, where a cabinet minister on the CIA’s payroll was being interrogated. Lee Kwan Yew, a key American ally, said that the station chief offered him a $3.3 million bribe to hush up the matter.
At 6 p.m. on Sunday, April 16, Stevenson cabled Rusk from New York to warn of the “gravest risk of another U-2 disaster in such uncoordinated action.” At 9:30 p.m. the president’s national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, called Dulles’s deputy director, General Charles Pearre Cabell. Bundy said the CIA could not launch air strikes on Cuba unless “they could be conducted from a strip within the beachhead” at the Bay of Pigs. At 10:15 p.m., Cabell and Bissell rushed to the elegant seventh-floor offices of the secretary of state. Rusk told them the CIA’s planes could go into battle to protect the beachhead, but not to attack Cuban airfields or harbors or radio stations. “He asked if I should like to speak to the President,” Cabell wrote. “Mr. Bissell and I were impressed with the extremely delicate situation with Ambassador Stevenson and the United Nations and the risk to the entire political position of the United States”—a situation created by Bissell and Barnes’s lies—and so “we saw no point in my speaking personally to the President.” Trapped by his own cover stories, Bissell chose not to fight. In his memoirs, he attributed his silence to cowardice.
When Cabell returned to the CIA’s war room to report what had happened, Jake Esterline seriously considered killing him with his own hands. The agency was going to leave its Cubans to die “like sitting ducks on that damn beach,” Esterline said.
Cabell’s cancellation order caught the CIA’s pilots in Nicaragua in their cockpits, revving their engines. At 4:30 a.m. on Monday, April 17, Cabell called Rusk at home and pleaded for presidential authority for more air power to protect the CIA’s ships, which were loaded to the gunwales with ammunition and military supplies. Rusk called President Kennedy at his Virginia retreat, Glen Ora, and put Cabell on the phone.
The president said he was unaware that there were going to be any air strikes on the morning of D-Day. Request denied.
Four hours later, a Sea Fury fighter-bomber swooped down on the Bay of Pigs. The American-trained pilot, Captain Enrique Carreras, was the ace of Fidel Castro’s air force. He took aim at the Rio Escondido, a rust-bucket freighter out of New Orleans under contract to the CIA. Below him to the southeast, aboard the Blagar, a converted World War II landing craft, a CIA paramilitary officer named Grayston Lynch fired at the Cuban fighter with a defective .50-caliber machine gun. Captain Carreras let loose a rocket that hit the forward deck of the Rio Escondido six feet below the railing, striking dozens of fifty-five-gallon drums filled with aviation gasoline. The fire ignited three thousand gallons of aircraft fuel and 145 tons of ammunition in the forward hold. The crew abandoned ship and started swimming for their lives. The freighter exploded in a fireball that sent a mushroom cloud rising half a mile high above the Bay of Pigs. From sixteen miles away, on a beach newly littered with the brigade’s dead and wounded, the CIA commando Rip Robertson thought Castro had dropped an atomic bomb.
President Kennedy called on Admiral Arleigh Burke, the commander of the U.S. Navy, to save the CIA from disaster. “Nobody knew what to do nor did the CIA who were running the operation and who were wholly responsible for the operation know what to do or what was happening,” the admiral said on April 18. “We have been kept pretty ignorant of this and have just been told partial truths.”
For two miserable days and nights, Castro’s Cubans and the CIA’s Cubans killed one another. On the night of April 18, the commander of the rebel brigade, Pepe San Roman, radioed back to Lynch: “Do you people realize how desperate the situation is? Do you back us up or quit?…Please don’t desert us. Am out of tank and bazooka ammo. Tanks will hit me at dawn. I will not be evacuated. Will fight to the end if we have to.” Morning came and no help arrived. “We are out of ammo and fighting on the beach. Please send help. We cannot hold,” San Roman shouted through his radio. His men were massacred standing knee-deep in the water.
“Situation for air support beachhead completely out of our hands,” the agency’s air operations chief told Bissell in a cable at noon. “Have now lost 5 Cuban pilots, 6 co-pilots, 2 American pilots, and one copilot.” In all, four American pilots on contract to the CIA from the Alabama National Guard were killed in combat. For years the agency hid the cause of their deaths from their widows and families.
“Still have faith,” said the air operation chief’s cable. “Awaiting your guidance.” Bissell had none to offer. At about two in the afternoon on April 19, San Roman cursed the CIA, shot his radio, and gave up the fight. In sixty hours, 1,189 members of the Cuban brigade had been captured and 114 killed.
“For the first time in my thirty-seven years,” Grayston Lynch wrote, “I was ashamed of my country.”
That same day, Robert Kennedy sent a prophetic note to his brother. “The time has come for a showdown, for in a year or two years the situation will be vastly worse,” he wrote. “If we don’t want Russia to set up missile bases in Cuba, we had better decide now what we are willing to do to stop it.”
“TAKE THE BUCKET OF SLOP AND PUT ANOTHER
COVER OVER IT”
President Kennedy told two of his aides that Allen Dulles had reassured him face-to-face in the Oval Office that the Bay of Pigs would be a sure-fire success: “Mr. President, I stood right here at Ike’s desk and told him I was certain that our Guatemalan operation would succeed, and Mr. President, the prospects for this plan are even better than they were for that one.” If so, it was an astonishing lie. Dulles in fact had told Eisenhower th
at the CIA’s chances in Guatemala were one in five at best—and zero without air power.
At the hour of the invasion, Allen Dulles was making a speech in Puerto Rico. His public departure from Washington had been part of a deception plan, but now it looked like an admiral abandoning ship. Upon his return, Bobby Kennedy recounted, he looked like living death, his face buried in his trembling hands.
On April 22, the president convened the National Security Council, an instrument of government he had disdained. After ordering the distraught Dulles to start “stepping up coverage of Castro activities in the United States”—a task outside the CIA’s charter—the president told General Maxwell Taylor, the new White House military adviser, to work with Dulles, Bobby Kennedy, and Admiral Arleigh Burke to perform an autopsy on the Bay of Pigs. The Taylor board of inquiry met that same afternoon, with Dulles clutching a copy of NSC 5412/2, the 1955 authorization for the covert operations of the CIA.
“I’m first to recognize that I don’t think that the CIA should run paramilitary operations,” Dulles told the board—a puff of smoke obscuring his decade of unblinking support for such operations. “I think, however, that rather than destroying everything and starting all over, we ought to take what’s good in what we have, get rid of those things that are really beyond the competence of the CIA, then pull the thing together and make it more effective. We should look over the 5412 papers and revise them in such a manner that paramilitary operations are handled in some other way. It’s not going to be easy to find a place to put them; it’s very difficult to keep things secret.”
The Taylor board’s work soon made it clear to the president that he needed a new way of running covert operations. One of the last witnesses before the board was a dying man who spoke with a grave clarity on the deepest problems confronting the CIA. The testimony of General Walter Bedell Smith resounds with chilling authority today:
QUESTION: How can we in a democracy use all our assets effectively without having to completely reorganize the Government?
GENERAL SMITH: A democracy cannot wage war. When you go to war, you pass a law giving extraordinary powers to the President. The people of the country assume when the emergency is over, the rights and powers that were temporarily delegated to the Chief Executive will be returned to the states, counties and to the people.
QUESTION : We often say that we are in a state of war at the present time.
GENERAL SMITH : Yes, sir, that is correct.
QUESTION : Are you suggesting that we should approximate the President’s wartime powers?
GENERAL SMITH : No. However, the American people do not feel that they are at war at the present time, and consequently they are not willing to make the sacrifices necessary to wage war. When you are at war, cold war if you like, you must have an amoral agency which can operate secretly…. I think that so much publicity has been given to CIA that the covert work might have to be put under another roof.
QUESTION : Do you think we should take the covert operations from CIA?
GENERAL SMITH : It’s time we take the bucket of slop and put another cover over it.
Three months later, Walter Bedell Smith died at age sixty-five.
The CIA’s inspector general, Lyman Kirkpatrick, ran his own postmortem on the Bay of Pigs. He concluded that Dulles and Bissell had failed to keep two presidents and two administrations accurately and realistically informed about the operation. If the CIA wanted to stay in business, Kirkpatrick said, it would have to drastically improve its organization and management. Dulles’s deputy, General Cabell, warned him that if the report fell into unfriendly hands, it would destroy the agency. Dulles wholeheartedly agreed. He saw to it that the report was buried. Nineteen of the twenty printed copies were recalled and destroyed. The one that survived was locked away for almost forty years.
In September 1961, Allen Dulles retired as director of central intelligence. Workers were still putting the finishing touches on the grand new CIA headquarters he had fought for years to build in the Virginia woodlands above the west bank of the Potomac River, seven miles from the edge of the capital. He had commissioned an inscription from the Gospel of John to be engraved in its central lobby: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” A medallion in his image was hung in the same soaring space. “Si monumentum requiris circumspice,” it reads: If you seek his monument, look around you.
Richard Bissell stayed on another six months. He later confessed in secret testimony that the vaunted expertise of his clandestine service was a façade—it was “not the place where one would expect to look for professional competence.” When he left, the president pinned the National Security Medal on his lapel. “Mr. Bissell’s high purpose, unbounded energy, and unswerving devotion to duty are benchmarks of the intelligence service,” he said. “He leaves an enduring legacy.”
Part of that legacy was a broken confidence. For the next nineteen years, no president would place his full faith and trust in the Central Intelligence Agency.
“YOU ARE NOW LIVING ON THE BULL’S EYE”
In his wrath after the Bay of Pigs, John Kennedy first wanted to destroy the CIA. Then he took the agency’s clandestine service out of its death spiral by handing the controls to his brother. It was one of the least wise decisions of his presidency. Robert F. Kennedy, thirty-five years old, famously ruthless, fascinated with secrecy, took command of the most sensitive covert operations of the United States. The two men unleashed covert action with an unprecedented intensity. Ike had undertaken 170 major CIA covert operations in eight years. The Kennedys launched 163 major covert operations in less than three.
The president had wanted to make RFK the new director of central intelligence, but his brother thought it best to choose a man who could afford the president political protection after the Bay of Pigs. After casting about for months, they settled on an Eisenhower elder statesman: John McCone.
Almost sixty years old, a deeply conservative California Republican, a devout Roman Catholic, and a fiery anticommunist, McCone would very likely have been secretary of defense had Nixon been elected in 1960. He had made a fortune building ships on the West Coast during World War II, then served as a deputy to Defense Secretary James Forrestal, ham mering out the first budget of the new Department of Defense in 1948. As undersecretary of the air force during the Korean War, he had helped create the first truly global military power of the postwar world. As chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission under Eisenhower, he had overseen the nation’s nuclear-weapons factories and held a seat on the National Security Council. McCone’s new covert operations chief, Richard Helms, described him as “straight from central casting in Hollywood,” with “white hair, ruddy cheeks, brisk gait, impeccable dark suits, rimless glasses, aloof manner, and unmistakable self-confidence.”
The new director was “not a man that people were going to love,” said Red White, his chief administrator, but he quickly became “very close with Bobby Kennedy.” McCone first bonded with Bobby as a coreligionist and fellow anticommunist. The attorney general’s big white clapboard house, Hickory Hill, was only a few hundred yards from the agency’s new headquarters, and Kennedy often stopped by the CIA in the morning on his way to work downtown at the Justice Department, dropping in after McCone’s daily 8:00 a.m. staff meeting.
McCone left a unique and meticulous daily record of his work, his thoughts, and his conversations, many first declassified in 2003 and 2004. His memoranda provide a moment-to-moment account of his years as director. Along with thousands of pages of conversations secretly recorded by President Kennedy inside the White House, many not accurately transcribed until 2003 and 2004, they detail the most dangerous days of the cold war.
Before his swearing-in, McCone tried to get the big picture of the agency’s operations. He toured Europe with Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell, went on to a Far East station chiefs’ meeting at a mountain retreat north of Manila, and immersed himself in paper.
But Dulles and Bissell left ou
t some details. They never saw fit to tell McCone about the CIA’s biggest, longest-lasting, and most illegal program in the United States: the opening of first-class mail coming in and out of the country. From 1952 onward, working at the main postal facility at the international airport in New York City, the CIA’s security officers opened letters and Jim Angleton’s counterintelligence staff sifted the information. Nor did Dulles and Bissell tell McCone about the CIA’s assassination plots against Fidel Castro, temporarily suspended after the Bay of Pigs. Almost two years would pass before the director learned of the murder plans; he never found out about the mail openings until the rest of the nation did.
After the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy was persuaded to rebuild the clearinghouses for covert action that he had torn down after his inauguration. The president’s foreign intelligence board of advisers was reestablished. The Special Group (later renamed the 303 Committee) was reconstituted to oversee the clandestine service, and its chairman for the next four years would be the national security adviser: cool, clipped, correct McGeorge Bundy of Groton and Yale, the former dean of the arts and sciences at Harvard University. The members were McCone, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and senior deputies from Defense and State. But until very late in the Kennedy administration it was left to the CIA’s covert operators to decide whether to consult with the Special Group. There were more than a few operations that McCone and the Special Group knew little or nothing about.
In November 1961, in the greatest secrecy, John and Bobby Kennedy created a new planning cell for covert action, the Special Group (Augmented). It was RFK’s outfit, and it had one mission: eliminating Castro. On the night of November 20, nine days before he took the oath of office as director, McCone answered his home telephone and heard the president summoning him to the White House. Arriving the following afternoon, he found the Kennedys in the company of a gangly fifty-three-year-old brigadier general named Ed Lansdale. His specialty was counterinsurgency, and his trademark was winning third-world hearts and minds with American ingenuity, greenback dollars, and snake oil. He had worked for the CIA and the Pentagon since before the Korean War, serving as Frank Wisner’s man in Manila and Saigon, where he helped pro-American leaders take power.